RadTherm

Thermal modeling program intended for comprehensive heat management design
and analysis. RadTherm has powerful capabilities to solve transient
solutions for 2D or 3D models in a natural environment, including the
effects of direct, diffuse, and reflected solar radiation, thermal
radiation, natural or forced convection, and conduction. RadTherm is
equipped with everything but YOUR geometry: pre-processing/ set-up, a
solver, and post-processor/ viewer. All this is integrated into one
carefully designed graphical user interface allowing users from any
engineering background to analyze designs very quickly and accurately.
Screen Shots

Keywords

convection, conduction, radiation, weather, solar, transient

Validation/Testing

N/A

Expertise Required

RadTherm is designed to allow users from any engineering background
(thermal or other) to analyze designs very quickly and accurately. The
intuitive arrangement of the user interface permits both novice and expert
users to set up and analyze thermal systems with a minimum of user input.

Users

Over 500 users worldwide. Government, private, and international.

Audience

Input

All inputs are entered through an intuitive user interface. Starting with a
meshed geometry the user assigns groups of elements to different parts. A
material and surface condition are then assigned to each part (either keep
default values or choose from an editable material database). Finally the
user simply assigns boundary conditions: heat loads, convection
coefficients (natural wind convection or fluid film), assigned
temperatures. For simulation of a natural environment, the user will also
choose a weather file. Weather files contain measured information such as
geographical location, time, date, wind speed/ direction, air temperature,
relative humidity, incident beam and diffuse solar energy, sky temperature,
rain rate, etc. The software is also capable of simulating terrain
backgrounds and has built in capacity for modeling foliage, snow, asphalt,
concrete, swamp, soil, and even water.

Output

Once the model is set up, the integrated solver produces fast results.
These results can be either viewed in the built-it post processor or exported.

Computer Platform

Windows, Sun, SGI, HP, and Linux.

Programming Language

C++

Strengths

The software's greatest advantage for building analysis is it's natural
environment capabilities. The software is designed for rapid analysis of
solar problems, including heating through windows, HVAC, and insulation
modeling.
The software features a state-of-the-art voxel-based ray tracer that is
used to compute radiation view factors and solar projected (apparent)
areas. This ray tracer provides one of the fastest radiation exchange
solvers on the market.